Story of Grandmother

Call this art of witchcraft an art
like the poem, paid for in blood,
milk, bread. Through the mouth all desires
known and willed into being, doing as she was instructed,
which means speaking the body of an old wives’
tale, the one where the witch

spun is a girl, twelve, spinning herself this claim: witch,
which is what opens the art
of want, the audacity to demand: sheep, wealth, wife,
a promise if she would fyrste consent. But spell love with blood,
and the bargained-for breaks down (learned
once desire’s

been given into), her desires
said aloud and so allowed, briefly, to have what a witch
gets delyuered her in the lykenesse of a cat, her elder-taught
art, this art of domestic care, which is the art
of birthing to form what wasn’t: sheep, wife, dead. The blood-
formed must be un-formed in the non-wife.

Here, a girl not taken to wife
after consummation of desire,
douting her self with childe pays blood
to waste his goodes, touch the wolf dead: witch
knowledge made a home economics, an essential art
home-schooled

on the sly: take a certayne herbe and drinke it. If they don’t teach
you, if the courts bar you, go to the midwives or the old wives
with their familiars (not the unfamiliar who art
elsewhere desiring
another). Call the cunning woman, call the witch
called from your own self, homespun, let the unplanned bleed

out. Come, cat in a basket: drink this poem, drink this blood,
Little Red Cap holds a lesson
on endings. Years gulp days and the granddaughter witch
yet founde not the quietnes that she desyred in her life- or wife-
state: desire
came in a morninge the shape of the still—art,

feasted on. Desire baked blood-warm. Witch,
thicken through instruction the poet’s first nurse-milk:
art is a cake from the oven eaten by an old wife.

 

Notes

The italicized text of the sestina “Story of Grandmother” comes from the pamphlet The Examination and confession of certaine wytches at Chensforde in the countie of Essex: before the Quenes Maiesties judges, the xxvi daye of July, anno 1566, at the assise holden there as then, and one of them put to death for the same offence, as their examination declareth more at large, London, printed August 13, 1566, EEBO. Elizabeth Frauncis, who purportedly confessed that when she was twelve her grandmother gave her a cat called Sathan that could grant her wishes, is credited as saying that some fifteen or sixteen years later she traded the cat for a cake. Elizabeth was not executed at this time but is presumed to be the Elizabeth Fraunces convicted of and executed for witchcraft in 1579.